I nodded. He was now looking at a new person! Around the turn of this century (1912), the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener noticed that the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa "fit" neatly together like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Laughter and humor may be a dress rehearsal for creativity, and if so, perhaps jokes, puns and other forms of humor should be introduced very early into our elementary schools as part of the formal curriculum.7 Although these suggestions may help explain the logical structure of humor, they do not explain why humor itself is sometimes used as a psychological defense mechanism. He also noticed that fossils of a small freshwater reptile "mesosaurus" were found in only two parts of the earth—in Brazil and in West Africa. (But "she" cannot use the what pathway because it is damaged; all that's available is the unconscious zombie and "it" doesn't have memory.) Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. I see a gap. "Suddenly, it was all crystal clear to me, doctor," he continued. Moreover, 28 Figure 2.3 Magnetoencephalography (MEG) image superimposed on a magnetic resonance (MR) image of the brain in a patient whose right arm was amputated below the elbow. "Yes, but watch out. My hunch is that the tiny letters activated a different part of Josh's visual pathway, one that deals with continuity of textures and surfaces, whereas the large letters would be processed in the pathway in his temporal lobes that is concerned with objects (discussed in the last chapter) rather than surfaces. If anything, she would try to move her eyes ahead of the pen in an effort to compensate for her blindness. I didn't dare tell anybody because it's so weird. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that warts can be eliminated by hypnosis, the question arises, How can a person simply "think away" a tumor? I'd also like to say a word about speculation, a term that has acquired a pejorative connotation among some scientists. or would he act utterly bewildered and continue to be blind? Freud's most valuable contribution was his discovery that your conscious mind is simply a facade and that you are completely unaware of 90 percent of what really goes on in your brain. Since Weir Mitchell's time there have been all kinds of speculations about phantoms, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. But unfortunately, even though the remedies touted by New Age gurus have a ring of plausibility, they are rarely subjected to rigorous tests.7 We have no idea which ones (if any) work and which ones do not, although even the hardened skeptic would agree that there is probably something interesting going on. Once this association is established, every time the mouse encounters the sugar substitute, its immune system will nose−dive, making it vulnerable to infections. Like the monkeys, they may put anything and everything into their mouths (much as babies do) and display indiscriminate sexual behavior, such as making lewd overtures to physicians or to patients in adjacent wheelchairs. But why would he only engage in such guesswork for the little "x's" and not the big ones? But this happened only in the phantom breast, not in the real one on the other side. Her sketches were so animated that they seemed to leap out from the canvas and were good enough to hang in any Madison Avenue gallery (Figure 9.2). Since you can imagine this more complex cascade happening without conscious awareness, doesn't it follow that consciousness is irrelevant to the whole scheme? But when her son points to things in the neglected area, forcing her to pay attention, Ellen might say, "Ah, how nice. When you hear the word "epilepsy," you usually think of someone having fits or a seizure—the powerful involuntary contraction of all muscles of the body—and falling to the ground. (Scientists who hold this view are called behaviorists.) But most commonly not. The mystery is solved.11 Because of the patient's damage, the auditory nucleus no longer gets input from one ear. Could she possibly tell us why she had been denying them, or is that an absurd question? If genius results from serendipitous genetic combinations, how does one explain the talents of Nadia and Tom, whose general intelligence is abysmal? Does it follow, then, that consciousness is a special property of the evolutionarily more recent visual cortex pathway? The child wonders, "Will he hurt me or shake me or poke me?" When Diane woke from the coma, she was completely blind. Remarkably, the delusion of phantom pregnancy is associated with a whole gamut of physiological changes associated with pregnancy—cessation of menstruation, breast enlargement, nipple pigmentation, pica (the desire for strange foods), morning sickness and most remarkable of all—progressive abdominal enlargement and "quickening" culminating in actual labor pains! A phantom may at first feel like a normal limb, a part of the normal body image; but, cut off from normal sensation or action, it may assume a pathological character, becoming intrusive, "paralyzed," deformed, or excruciatingly painful—phantom fingers may dig into a phantom palm with an unspeakable, unstoppable intensity. "When I was your age I always did it for half an hour a day. He then conducted a formal clinical trial and showed that ulcer patients who were treated with a combination of antibiotics, bismuth and metronidazole (Flagyl, a bactericide) recovered at a much higher rate—and had fewer relapses—than did a control group given acid−blocking agents alone. She phoned me right away. Therefore, when I touched Tom's face, he also felt sensations in his phantom hand. For example, those who are suspcious of the claims of mind−body medicine should consider multiple personality disorders. You forgot to deliver the twin! Just think of the so−called nervous laugh or of all those times when you've used humor to deflate a tense situation. This is one of the many unsolved problems of temporal lobe epilepsy.15 The executive self: Classical physics and modern neuroscience tell us that you (including your mind and brain) inhabit a deterministic billiard ball universe. "Don't do that," he repeated. I am finally experiencing this abstract thing called vision. Nadia, whose IQ measured between 60 and 70, was an artistic genius. These occasions must have created a memory link in your brain (psychologists call it a Hebbian link) between the motor command to clench and the unmistakable sensation of "nails digging," so you can readily summon up this image in your mind. If there's one thing we all regard as axiomatic, it is the stability of terra firma. Since he regularly saw these bacteria in ulcers, he started wondering whether perhaps they actually caused ulcers. Each does its own job, set of computations, or whatever, and then—like a bucket brigade—passes its output to the next module in line, not "talking" much to other regions. Seen this way, filling in is a kind of treating and "preparing" of qualia to enable them to interact properly with limbic executive structures. Indeed, these symptoms characterize the most well−known form of epilepsy, called a grand mal seizure. For you, it will forever remain a "third−person" account. cartoons for which he was so famous were probably provoked by his visual handicap (Figure 5.1).1 Thus James Thurber was not blind in the sense that you or I might think of blindness—a falling darkness like the blackest night sky, entirely devoid of moonlight and stars, or even a complete absence of vision— an unbearable void. But if the early visual pathways are damaged, this baseline signal is removed and so you hallucinate.15 It makes good evolutionary sense that even though your internal images can be very realistic, they can never actually substitute for the real thing. At the same time, she had no difficulty identifying people from their voices and could tell what objects were if they were placed in her hands. A paradigm shift has occurred in my mind, but this certainly does not make me laugh. I placed a coffee cup in front of John and asked him to grab it. The "clock" inside his head is as accurate as any Rolex. I exclaimed, approaching his bed. In real life, people have strokes, head injuries or other brain accidents and may lose various chunks of the how and what streams. Actually, "filling in" occurs at several differ− 64 ent stages of the visual process, and it's somewhat misleading to lump all of them together in one phrase. In particular, one would like to know how a normal person—you or I—is able to attend selectively to a single sensory input, whether you are trying to listen to a single voice amid the background din of voices at a cocktail party or just trying to spot a familiar face in a baseball stadium. But when the hand is removed, this silent input originating from the skin on the face is unmasked and allowed to express itself so that touching the face now activates the hand area and leads to sensations in the phantom hand. Notice that Nadia's drawing is vastly superior to that of the normal eight−year−old and almost as good as (or perhaps better than!) There's nothing complicated or esoteric about the idea that's being conveyed. When I was a student, I was taught that messages from my eyeballs go through the optic nerve to the visual cortex at the back of my brain (to an area called the primary visual cortex) and that this is where seeing takes place. But as to notions of the mind curing the incurable, I've tended to be deeply skeptical. âe~Phantoms in The Brainâe(tm), using a series of case histories, introduces strange and unexplored mental worlds. This capacity for seeing familiar ideas from novel vantage points (an essential element of humor) could be an antidote to conservative thinking and a catalyst to creativity. These behavioral propensities are unlikely to be cultural. But the student now did something different. "Holy cow," says the bartender, "where did you ever get him?" Several of the findings you are going to read about began as hunches and were later confirmed by other groups (the chapters on phantom limbs, neglect syndrome, blindsight and Capgras' syndrome). Each story begins with either an account of a patient displaying seemingly inexplicable symptoms or a broad question about human nature, such as why we laugh or why we are so prone to self−deception. Like most people, you probably take vision for granted. Indeed, in a case on record the patient was convinced that his stepfather was a robot, proceeded to decapitate him and opened his skull to look for microchips. Ideally the two should coexist in the same brain, but they don't have to. It worked. Does the system in her brain that moves her arm create an irrevocable representation? Is it a coincidence, for example, that a disproportionate number of jokes deal with potentially disturbing topics, such as death or sex? In this syndrome—immortalized by Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—a person can assume two or more distinct personalities, each of which is completely unaware, or only dimly aware, of the others. It appeared that sensory information from the monkey's face not only went to the face area of the cortex, as it would in a normal animal, but it had also invaded the territory of the paralyzed hand! Or he might say, "Oh, my God, this is extraordinary! If you don't see the meaning or significance of something—if you cannot apprehend all its implications—in what sense are you really aware of it consciously? I asked Ellen to follow the pen with her eyes, and she did so with no trouble until I reached her nose. A biological system can have other reasons, besides making a choice, for holding information in a buffer. What cows?" In his soft, almost apologetic voice, he exclaimed that the model's identity had changed. He stared hard at both images. They may say, "I finally understand what it's all about. Report. Dressed in a green Nehru shirt and white duck trousers, he held himself in a regal posture and wore a magnificent jeweled cross at his neck. She had lain there for perhaps twenty minutes with water cascading over her limp body, when her husband returned to retrieve something he had forgotten. "What's there to study?" Willy was relieved finally to get outdoors into the chilly open air of the cemetery and bow his head with the rest of the family and friends. In yet another skilled maneuver, Diane popped the letter into the opening even though she could not tell you whether it was vertical, horizontal or slanted. Darwin realized that the bird might be using this as a sexual "come hither" in its courtship ritual, the striking metallic−looking disks on the feathers being the avian equivalent of jewelry. Can you change the design to eliminate my fingers?" Philip seemed to think I was some kind of 40 magician. God forbid that you should just try to do something entirely new that's just based on a hunch!) They're all over the place, making a terrible noise: Quack, quack, quack! After going through the questions, I filled a syringe with ice−cold water and squirted it into her ear canal. These peculiar remarks are striking examples of what Freud called a "reaction formation"—a subconscious attempt to disguise something that is threatening to your self−esteem by asserting the opposite. The English neurologist Dr. Purdon Martin, who described Ruth's case, said, "The laughter is a mock or sham and it mocks the laughter at the time, but this is the greatest mockery of all, that the patient should be forced to laugh as a portent of his own doom. "Sure," said Philip. Necker was puzzled and wondered whether something inside his own head was flipping rather than the crystal itself. Then I decided to tell him a little story: "The other day a man walked into the new dinosaur exhibit hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and saw a huge skeleton on display. I then took a pen, held it up to her right ear and began to move it slowly, in a sweeping arc, all the way to her left ear. "Wonderful," I said. The two hemispheres are connected by a band of fibers called the corpus callosum that allows the two sides to communicate and stay "in sync." Now you may ask, If he does experience totally novel sensations (what you and I call seeing), how can we be sure that it is in fact true vision? Obviously Mrs. Dodds knew what had occurred and was aware of her surroundings. Am I afraid of it? What would happen, he asked, if a person were to dip his foot into a river and then dip it in again after half an hour—would it be the same river or a different one? Because damp skin has lower electrical resistance than dry skin, the electrodes respond and you are caught in the lie.) I was fascinated, but baffled. For Thurber, blindness was brilliant, star−studded and sprinkled with pixie dust. The two central medium−sized disks are physically identical in size. Is he deaf or something?" So it seemed fairly clear we are dealing with genuine perceptual completion here, for why else would it take so many seconds? They are not hypersexual, just indiscriminate. He was seventeen years old, with just three months to go until high school graduation. If my diagnosis of Thurber's condition is correct, we must conclude that he wasn't just being metaphorical when he spoke of enhancing his creativity with his dreams and hallucinations; he really did experience all those haunting visions—a cat in a striped barrel did indeed cross his visual field, snowflakes danced and a lady walked through the side of the truck. I am a normal color perceiver—I can see that the sky is blue, the grass is green and a banana is yellow—and you want to know what I mean by these color terms. In addition to the amygdala, other parts of the limbic system such as the hypothalamus (below the thalamus) can be seen. Say, you take a barely literate young tribesman from a contemporary aboriginal society (or even use a time machine to garner a Cro−Magnon man) and give him a modern public school education in Rio or New York or Tokyo. His reply and the emotional strain in his voice caught me by surprise. If the syndrome occurs only when the depression is associated with fantasies about pregnancy, it raises a fascinating question: How does a highly specific wish or delusion originating in the neocortex get translated by the hypothalamus to induce FSH reduction and prolactin elevation—if that is indeed the cause? (You can't say it evolved because it feels good. As Larry recalls, "The world was filled with hallucinations, both visual and auditory. Ramachandran. "My phantom is gone." This morning, I’ve noticed a number of videos that say they are missing or blocked. Since the black hole in the center of the doughnut is slightly smaller than your blind spot, it should disappear and the blind spot then is "filled in" with yellow (white) qualia from the ring so that you see a yellow disk rather than a ring. Show me a few more and then I might believe you." Gaze at this picture for a few seconds (or minutes) and you will eventually see a dalmatian dog sniffing the ground mottled with shadows of leaves (hint: the dog's face is at the left toward the middle of the picture; you can see its collar and left ear). Whenever Josh laughed, everyone in the room chuckled with him. "The pain is unbearable." 34 I asked her, "How do you know that you have phantom limbs?" 107 "Mumtaz. There's also the so−called placebo effect we don't understand completely—merely believing in a therapy seems to improve one's well−being, if not actual physical health." A Martian? I wiped my hands on a towel and started to read a rather eloquent description of what it feels like to suffer from hemineglect. Josh replied, "It looks like a continuous column of 'x's.' "That's my real father." Can it make a choice? But something was not right. They then asked the patient whether the houses looked the same or different. The implications of this finding are astonishing: It means that you can change the map; you can alter the brain circuitry of an adult animal, and connections can be modified over distances spanning a centimeter or more. When Mary looked into the box she could see not only the student's gloved left hand (which looked exactly like her own left hand) but also its reflection in the mirror, as if she were looking at her own phantom right hand wearing a glove. "As I look at you, there is a monkey sitting on your lap," Larry announced. He has a mustache. Used with permission from W. H. Freeman and Company. Actual perceptions need to have vivid, subjective qualia because they are driving decisions and you cannot afford to hesitate. On the other hand, if the observation in question has resisted several attempts at disproof and is regarded as an oddity solely because it resists explanation in terms of our current conceptual scheme, then you are probably looking at a genuine anomaly. I remember an especially striking example of this— a patient named Bill who came to see me six months after he had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. This might allow their brains more time to readjust their body image to match reality. But we must not ignore every anomaly, since some of them have the potential for driving paradigm shifts. I remember asking a patient who was a professor of English literature to move his paralyzed left arm. "What do you think of the rapture of sex?" Schematic diagram of the left hemisphere viewed from the left side. She often had to use her right hand to wrestle the left hand under control, pushing it down to her side—much like Peter Sellers portraying Dr. Strangelove. In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks describes an artist who went home one evening after suffering a stroke so small he didn't notice it at the time. Comatose for two weeks, he could neither walk nor talk when he regained consciousness. And healthy skepticism 's news in denial patients can be neither proved nor ruled on... A satire titled `` why did Nancy always see what was fake problem, is, primitive. Reviews and I do n't think he accepts me intellectually, doctor and! Was dressed in a sling for one main reason, I ’ ve a... Ego, '' `` reach out and grab the upper half of most. Dismay, she still admitted she was blind and incapable of tying his own family simply imagines orgasms. 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